Series on Culture and Literature: The Life and Poetry of Georg Trakl in the Shadow of First World War

Georg Trakl, (born Feb. 3, 1887, Salzburg, Austria—died Nov. 3, 1914, Cracow, Galicia, Austria-Hungary). Expressionist poet whose emotional life story and wartime torments made him Austria’s foremost elegist of decay and death. Like other famous Austrian artists (e.g. painters Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele, composer Alban Berg, writers Robert Musil and Heimito von Doderer) he was deeply influenced by WWI, that much, that he either attempted or threatened to shoot himself in the aftermath of these horrors and was sent to a military hospital at Cracow for observation. There he died of an overdose of cocaine, perhaps taken inadvertently.

Speaker J. Dum-Tragut is professor of Armenian Studies, General Linguistics and director of the Center for the Study of the Christian East. In the last three years, she has been working on a comprehensive project to investigate the biographies of Armenian prisoners-of- war, who were detained in Austro-Hungarian camps as soldiers of the Russian Tsarist army during the First World War.

This project and the equally extensive collection of archival and field work material from Austria, Armenia and Russia will be presented to a broader public in autumn of 2019 at the Genocide Museum in Yerevan.